Should Work-from-Home Parents Hire Help with Child Care?

Are you a working parent wondering if it's time to hire help with child care? Here are some signs that you need some assistance with kids during the day. Save

Many parents who freelance or do other work from a home office struggle with the quandary of how to get their job done while kids are in the house. When you work in a traditional office, it’s a no-brainer that of course child-care arrangements must be made during the day, so that moms and dads can go to work and tend to their professional tasks and responsibilities. But when it comes to working remotely, the issue clouds a bit. (Spoiler alert: the answer is usually yes, you do need hire help with child care!)

Here’s why work-from-home parents may want to consider hiring help with child care:

Laura Vanderkam, author of several time management and productivity books, including I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time, has written extensively on this topic. Among her many convincing points is this one:

“I know the reasons WFH [work from home] parents try [to do their own child care while working from home]. Child care is expensive, and it seems like this should work. If you get 3 hours of preschool, 2 hours of nap or enforced quiet time, do 30 minutes here and there while dealing with the kids, and maybe 90 minutes after bedtime, that’s 7 hours a day. That’s basically full time. But this time is fragmented and it’s hard to concentrate,” she writes in a blog post from her website.

Vanderkam concludes that “if you work you probably need child care, and where you do your work probably doesn’t matter as much as many think it does.”

If you’ve made a commitment to do a job—whether it’s for clients or a boss, and whether you do your work at corporate headquarters or at your kitchen table—then you need focused attention to do that job without being constantly distracted by competing priorities.

While it’s nice to think that you’ll be able to crank out a report while the kids watch Paw Patrol or take a client call during nap time, life with little ones underfoot rarely works out that smoothly. Just as you’re about to type out that last point, a shriek to help with a potty break interrupts you. And if it’s a critical business call that’s at stake, leaving it to chance whether the baby wakes up earlier than usual is a risk that professionals of all stripes shouldn’t have to take—even those who happen to work where their young children live.

Still think you might be able to push through and do double duty when both client deliverables and cute (or sometimes annoying) kids are vying for your focus? Review the thinking points below, and then answer each with “yes” or “no” to help you determine whether it might be time to bring in some help with child care during your workday:

Are you being interrupted multiple times as you try to focus on work projects?

Do you feel guilty that you’re spending time on work while your kids are in the next room?

Has the former reliability of two-hour naps morphed into differently timed wake-ups that leave you no scheduling predictability?

Would you simply like to feel less torn and divided between your work and your children during time that you’ve carved out to complete business matters?

If you answered “yes” to even one of these questions, you could likely improve both your work and your family life by enlisting some extra support for child care during your business hours.

If you answered “yes” to all of them, don’t wait any longer—ask a family member or friend to help, or if budget allows, bring aboard paid assistance from a babysitter or nanny. Your boss, clients, and kids will all benefit from your decision to get help with child care when help is needed.